North Georgia Gal's Financial Awakening

Trying to Make Smarter Decisions Day by Day

Where to Begin...it is hard to believe that it has been 9 years since I started this Blog. You guys have always been here supporting me and cheering me on.

I am in the process of refinancing my LOC into a mortgage, rolling my credit card debt into it. Will probably then close all of my credit cards after that.

I still have my budget in place for a couple of months out, but I still have to make changes to it.

I hope to sell my house in about 6 months, and move closer to my kids, about an hour away. I will still commute to work because it would only be about 40 minutes. But this can't happen until my responsibility to my mom is done, she is close to moving in with my niece, but who knows when that will happen.

Cell Phone Bill

August 10th, 2011 at 09:55 am

I have verizon cell phones with 5 lines. Three of the lines are for me and the kids. My EXDH has the other two lines. This bill is roughly $300 per month for 2100 minutes. We generally go over 1400 but are way less that 2100. So I can't reduce the minutes to save money. However, XDH uses most of the minutes. He used 1052 of the 1488 minutes used. He was just paying what the charges were for his line, 9.99 per month for the line and the ringback tones. This month I asked him to pay $125 of the bill since most of the minutes used were his. He was fine with this. So from now on, I will be getting more money from him for the cell phone bill. That will really help me out and it is only fair I think. I can't reduce the amount of minutes due to his usage.

My budget is looking very good. So good in fact that I think I am going to get the air in my car fixed on Saturday, as long as it just needs to be charged. If it needs extensive work I can't get that done, but it will only be about $50 to get it charged and see if there are any other problems. It is just brutal sitting in a car with no air where the drivers side window won't go down and now the the controls on the driver side won't make the passenger window go down and I am too short to reach across the passenger seat and roll down the window. Even with the back windows open if feels like a sauna in there. Keep your fingers crossed that it just needs some freon.

10 Responses to “Cell Phone Bill”

Why don't you boot him off your plan? That is ASTRONOMICALLY high! CeeJay (sp?) has move over to pre-paid plans and it's gone really well for her. Maybe you could try that for you and your kids? I would get rid of the $300 plan immediately if possible -- even if there is a penalty (depending on what the penalty is). Seriously... Think what a difference an extra $200+ would do to your month budget?

Bucky's got a good point. Even if you pay a penalty for canceling your contract, you could easily make that up with the savings. Sounds like you and your kids use 436 minutes on average? At 10 cents per minute, that would come to $43.60 on prepaid, maybe $50 with tax.

T-Mobile is an awesome deal, if you can pay $107 upfront you get 1000 minutes (can be used for texting too) and one year of service. I reload about twice a year.

Net10 is what NT uses and it's a pretty good deal too; $32 or so every 2 months for 300 minutes. You have to renew within the 2 month period to keep your phone active, but you can renew earlier if you run out of minutes.

We have two T-Mobile phone/plans and one Net10, and we've gotten our total average cost down to about $60 per month; hope to get it down to $50 average for the year eventually.

Unfortunately where we live T Mobile and Net10 don't work. The only phone companies that work are Verizon and Cingular. We live in a very rural area. And we sent over 12000 text messages last month so we need a text heavy plan.

Even if you don't change to pre paid, I would at least look into getting your plan down to just your 3 lines and dropping your minutes way down, while keeping unlimited texting. Although if you are with Verizon, I think that Verizon-to-Verizon texts might be free.

You really should look into making a change.

What are the odds that the exDH is actually going to pony up the $125 a month? Isn't it better to get a fixed bill lower than rely on him paying what he owes? No one can take that money away from you.

That seems like a lot for a cell phone- but really $50.00 +/- per phone. Do you also pay for a landline too? Think of how many hours of work you have to put in to have these phones? Is it really worth it? Do ALL of the children need phones or can 1 or 2 of them share a phone? My husband and I pay $70.00 (which includes surcharges, taxes and other crap they ding you for) for 1000 anytime minutes, free incoming (regardless of time of day), unlimited nights *(starting at 7 pm), unlimited weekends, unlimited text (regardless of incoming/outgoing/photo). Good for you for asking the ex to pay his fair share.

Even with Verizon, we only pay $110/month for 4 of us. Seems to me there has got to be something better out there, with any cell carrier. (I am partial to Verizon - personally - never have been impressed with the coverage elsewhere). Unlimited texting would be $$130/month, I believe. We don't use a lot of minutes, is the thing (since weekends and other verizon users are free - mostly what we use). But seems to me they should have other options with more minutes.

Leave a Reply

(Note: If you were logged in, we could automatically fill in these fields for you.)